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| Ancestry.com Maps Your Ancestors for You |
Before moving to Sanpete County, my mother informed me that I had ancestors from Denmark on my father's side.
I did not investigate this at all until I moved to a city that is nicknamed "Little Denmark." There is a relatively new housing development in northeast Ephraim called Danish Fields.
I belong to a heritage organization called Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. During one meeting, the speaker asked all those who had Danish ancestry to raise their hands.
Denmark is one of the three countries that constitutes Scandinavia along with Norway and Sweden. Every May, Ephraim hosts the Scandinavian Festival, which is coming on the Friday and Saturday before Memorial Day--as always.
I confess that in the weeks leading to Scandinavian Days this spring I have been reading voraciously about Vikings even though I have no idea if I have Viking blood. I work part time at the public library, and I am getting ready to help patrons learn more about these infamous Nordic people.
(Nordic countries include the three Scandinavian countries as well as Finland and Iceland as well as autonomous territories of Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Read some books or watch some YouTube videos about Vikings to understand how they went from people from a region to a type of vocation that included people from a wide range of countries and ethnicities who traveled from Canada to the Caspian Sea and beyond.)
Yes, I think about being Danish a lot in May, given the Scandinavian Festival. However, even during my daily life, I note that a lot of people here have Scandinavian names such as Christensen, Jensen, Larson, Nielsen, Olson and so on. There are houses with Scandinavian architecture. And patrons at the Manti Temple conduct a lot of family history and ordinance work for Scandinavian ancestors. (I need to figure out how to pronoun the "j" in these names.)
By looking at the "Map your Ancestors" feature on the website / app Ancestry.com, I see that I have 21 Danish ancestors.
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| 112 UK kin and 42 European kin |
For context, this is not Old World country that is home to most of my ancestors. I have 85 from England (55%), 25 from Scotland (16%), 14 from Poland (9%), 5 from Germany (3%), 1 from Wales (001%), and 1 from Sweden (001%).
With 152 ancestors from Europe total, the 21 from Denmark make up nearly 14% (13.8%) of my Old World (UK / Europe) heritage.
That's enough that I should start looking at these Danish ancestors, most of whom come from in or around Copenhagen.
On my dad's side, Johan Svendsen and his wife Bendte Pedersdatter were married in 1807 in what was spelled Kobenhavn at that time. Their children changed their surname to Jensen, and one of their great granddaughters married Ephraim Franklin Hanks (the grandson of the pioneer scout Ephraim Knowlton Hanks).
I have other relatives on my dad's side who are Danish: Larsen, Nielsdatter, Olsen, Poulsdatter, Jensdatter, and Petersdatter. (And, yes, I know about the naming convention of -sen/son for sons and datter for daughters).
I have never been to Denmark. To tell the truth, after living in nine different states at 39 different addresses, I am not itching to travel. However, I might take a trip to Denmark sometime in the next five years (health and finances permitting). I would like to visualize some of the landscape where my Danish ancestors walked. And I would like to hear some of the names pronounced by locals. It would be enriching.
In the meantime, I want to study more about these relatives, about Denmark in general and Copenhagen specifically so that if I do manage my time, finances, and responsibilities, I can better understand what I am experiencing when I travel to the land of some of my ancestors.
Related:
Preserving Legacies with the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers
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